Calamity Read online

  “Here, you old cat,” my Ma said. She took the red cloth from under her arm and tossed it over the fence; it hit Mrs. Sowders in the face and draped over her shoulder like a winter scarf while she stared at my Ma in stunned silence. Even the naked boy shut up his yowling and goggled at her.

  Ma said, “Take that cloth and make a dress for that bastard of yours.”

  Then she yipped like a bullwhacker on the trail, and the horse sprang away. I sucked in a breath—it was dry and gritty with the dust of her mount’s hooves—and my heart about busted with pride at the sight of her upright back, her knees sharp and flagrant in their satin and lace, the locks of her black hair bouncing. She was like the heroine of some grand tale, all fire and devilry. I never loved my mother more than in that moment, when I saw her soaring free.

  Three months later they found her at the bottom of a river gulch. Pa said she must have fallen from a horse, all that long way to the flat red rocks below—an accident, Pa said. He never let me see her body, but I imagine when they found her, her arms were outspread like a black bird flying.

  All that long winter while I stayed inside, cooking and cleaning for the little ones—more than I ever had done before—my Pa talked about the gold fields. “Martha,” he told me, “in Montana when the sun rises you can’t look at the foothills for the way they sparkle with gold. The shiningness will blind you, but it’ll make you rich, so you can buy a new set of eyes. A man can walk through a crick bed there, and when he gets out the other side, he can tap his boots and collect the resultant pile of gold dust and sell it and live like a king.”

  Of course, I didn’t believe him. I doubt he believed himself. But he needed something to hitch to, some star to set a course by, or he’d go crazy from looking at all six of his children’s faces—each of us needing something, food or shoes that fit and didn’t have holes in the sides, or enough candles to keep the feared dark at bay, or a man we could rely on to provide for us proper. All six of us with Ma’s features, her dark eyes and her wide, flat mouth, her high cheekbones, her pale skin. But only me with a lick of his own influence.

  Well, that spring, just as the castles of thunder built themselves in the sky brick by purple brick, Pa came home from town and stood in the doorway of our cabin and announced in a big, hopeful voice that we was all setting out for Montana, to become a family of prospectors and make ourselves rich as King Midas. He said we would set out that very day. We must all pack up our few belongings, and catch the hens and put them in crates, and sell the horses we didn’t need because by that night we’d be sleeping under a blanket of stars. Then he stepped aside like a showman and gestured grandly out into the yard, and I looked past him at the canvas-topped wagon that stood waiting out there in the afternoon light. A pair of red steers with heavy necks and mournful eyes was yoked to the hitch, and it looked so like the wagons I’d watched creep along the horizon every spring and summer that I clapped my hands and skipped from foot to foot just like the little ones.

  Although he hadn’t given any more warning than chattering about the gold fields all winter long, still I wasn’t surprised by this turn of events. I’d sensed it coming, I think, ever since Ma’s funeral. As the few good souls who attended her service sang out a hymn that was far more sweet and serene than my mother had been, I’d felt my father tremble beside me, and felt something rattle inside him. Ma’s death cut my father loose. Like a wild pony, he wanted to run. That was fine by me; I was ready for adventure, too. Or I thought myself ready.

  It didn’t take more than a few hours to roll up and tie our bits of property in blankets and flour sacks. While we children worked, Pa explained how he’d sold the forty mostly-barren acres of the farm and used the money to buy the wagon, and a couple of shovels and picks for us to dig with when we got to the golden foothills. We had enough food in the cabin to last us for a few days, plus the hens were still laying eggs, and when they stopped we could butcher them and turn them into soup, cooked over a chip fire on the prairie, just like the Indians did. And when we ran out of food, Pa said, he would ride to the nearest town and strike up a game of faro and use his winnings to buy flour and sugar and onions and smoked meat for our soup kettle.

  It seemed like a grand idea to me—the very adventure I’d been dreaming of all my young life. With Pa’s help, I bundled the little ones into the wagon and saddled two horses—one for me, one for my brother Cilus, who was almost two years my junior. Well before the sun set, the Canary tribe was making tracks out across the prairie, following the river’s gentle bend, searching for the place where the grass was pounded down into a wide, dry road and the ruts of countless wheels and heavy hooves had worn deep down into the earth.

  I turned a couple of times in the saddle, looking back at the cabin where I’d spent the whole of my life. But after a while it was just a little dark thing among the sage, sharp-cornered but insignificant, like a bit of knapped flint dropped and forgotten. I turned my back to the cabin for the last time and felt its hold let go. Somewhere ahead lay Montana and gold, and a new life was calling.

  We didn’t make it very far before the wagon broke down. I estimate it was three days, maybe four, before an axle gave out. Pa hadn’t reckoned with that possibility. True, he’d traveled by wagon nearly fourteen years before, the time he found my Ma in the fields of Iowa. But his own father had been at the helm, as it were, and Pa had ridden about carefree, and left the driving and the upkeep of the prairie schooner to others.

  We waited at the side of the trail more than two days before help arrived. During that time, we slept away the day’s heat in the dirt beneath the wagon bed. The wagon settled down against its busted part like an old man leaning quiet and near-broken on a cane. The cattle was tethered nearby and grazed till they grew fat and lazy, and every night, once the mosquitoes had all gone to sleep, we walked the cattle and the horses down to a hidden crick for water.

  Pa kept a restless eye on the trail. His face in the blue shadow of the wagon was pale and strained, and he squinted continually to the south and east. At the time, I thought he was fearful of Indians. I think now he was looking for soldiers—rebels or unionists, it made no difference, for the few times either kind of soldier came through Princeton they raised Hell and were prone to anger and violence.

  “If I give the word,” Pa told us (more times than I could count over those two long days), “you pick up the baby, Martha, and all of you kids run like Hell for the crick bed. Stick your finger in Sara’s mouth so she don’t cry. Stay quiet and hide till you hear me call you back, or if you never hear me call, stay out of sight of the trail till nightfall.”

  On the third morning of our stranding, just as I used the last bit of flour to cook plain cakes on a flat rock beside a weak, smokeless fire, six or seven wagons came up through the prairie, rising from the distant line of grasses like clouds gathering on a horizon. Pa gave a long sigh and leaned on the wagon box, as if fear had been all that had held him upright, and now, with fear draining away, he wilted and sagged. He had Cilus and me rustle the little ones out of our wagon’s shadow and spit on a kerchief to clean their faces, and we all lined up beside the trail’s tracks in order of height, to make a good presentation to the newcomers.

  The sound of their wagons rumbling reached out along the prairie and overtook all our senses long before the party was in shouting range. That jarring, never-ending, bone-rough malaise the little ones had complained of all the days since leaving our cabin—just hearing the rattle again set them to fidgeting and whining in anticipation of more tiring hours spent in a wagon’s bed. But Pa snapped at them to stand still and I boosted baby Sara on my hip and watched the wagons slow through the glittering haze of trail dust. The lead schooner stopped level with us and the driver, a fat man with a long black beard, looked us all over in silence.

  “Had a little trouble,” my Pa said. “Axle broke and I don’t have ’nother.”

  A woman’s long, lean face appeared below the drawn-up canvas of the canopy. She wore a bl
ue ruffle bonnet over her hair and she had raking, sharp pale eyes. She squinted at me with the baby on my hip, then she hid her mouth behind a hand and whispered in the fat man’s ear. He made an abrupt motion like shooing flies. The woman disappeared again into the depths of the wagon.

  “Got no axle to spare,” the man said, “but if you can pay your way, you and the children may ride with us.”

  Pa patted his trouser pockets vaguely, searching for something he knew he wouldn’t find. Finally he said, “All’s I got to pay with is some chickens in these crates.”

  “And the oxen,” the man said. “Your horses and saddles, too.”

  I got fearful at that, the prospect of no longer riding free but having to endure the jolting and jarring of the wagons, and I picked at Pa’s sleeve with nervous fingers.

  “Only one horse and saddle,” Pa insisted. “I’ll need one of my own for coming and going, and one to keep fresh.”

  “Coming and going where?” The fat man laughed, wheezing trail dust.

  “And,” Pa added, “my biggest boy here can chop fire wood when we stop at nights. He has an axe and he keeps it sharp.”

  “Not a lot of trees between here and Montana.”

  “Plenty of broken-down wagons, though, I bet. And chopping’s work you’d rather not do at the end of a long day of driving.”

  Such a fat man certainly isn’t fond of exertion, was my ungracious thought.

  “Got no milk for the baby,” the woman’s voice called shrilly from inside the wagon. “Unless that slip of a thing beside you is your wife and can nurse it herself, in which case she is too young for you, mister, and you’re bound for Hellfire.”

  Even though Pa wanted us all to keep quiet and look as good as we could manage, and allow him to do the bargaining, I couldn’t help but speak up. “I’m not her mother but her sister, Missuz. Our ma’s dead, but Baby Sara eats all right without any milk. She’s got most of her teeth and I chew up her food for her, so there!”

  Pa cast me a dark glance. My so there was unnecessary, I knew, but still I felt it was warranted.

  “My daughter Martha here is fourteen.” Pa lied, but I was big and strong enough to look it. “She can do the washing real good.”

  I stifled a groan. There was no task on God’s green earth I hated more than washing clothes. I imagined the fat man’s trousers stank of that awful, musty sweat you get between the cheeks. You know the kind, when you’ve been sitting in the sun too long and washing too little. But there wasn’t much for it. We might wait another week for more wagons to come by, and we had run out of flour. Our few scrawny hens wouldn’t see us through many more days. If I had to work to feed my brothers and sisters, I’d do it. But I wouldn’t do it with a smile on my face.

  The fat man finally nodded, and Pa approached, hand outstretched to shake. When the deal was done, a few tall, strapping boys emerged from the wagon to tie the oxen to the back of their box and take Cilus’s horse. Cilus blinked back the tears he wasn’t willing to shed before these tall stranger-boys with their harsh laughter and darting eyes, their wiry arms hard and angled from months spent working on the trail.

  Pa tried to pull his shaking-hand away from the fat man, but he gripped him tighter and said with half a laugh, “The oxen and the horse, and your chickens, and labor from your two kids—that gets you a ride and a share of our food for a week. After that, we leave you wherever we are unless you can come up with more.”

  “That’s mighty un-Christian of you,” Pa told him.

  “Be grateful, Mister. In a week we’ll be out of the range of the soldiers and your children will be safer than they are here.”

  “In a week we’ll be in Indian country.”

  “Rather face reds than rebs.” The fat man laughed real loud at his own wit.

  Pa jerked his hand away and turned back to us. He gave a quick nod; Cilus, Lena, and Lije pulled the chicken crates from the shade and slung their bundles on their backs, while I handed Baby Sara to the squint-eyed woman in the wagon and boosted little Isabelle up inside, too. I was about to climb up to tend my smallest sisters, but Pa restrained me with a hand on my shoulder.

  “On your horse, Martha.”

  “You sure?”

  “I won’t have one of these young jacks making off with your horse and never giving it back.”

  When I was mounted, and the fat man called to his oxen to get a move on—when the train started moving again, creaking toward a far, faint suggestion of blue mountains—I sat still on my horse as Pa maneuvered close beside me. He watched the wagons roll along for a time in silence.

  Then I said, “One week, and we gave them all we had. Will we reach Montana in a week?”

  “Not even close.”

  “What’ll we do, then?”

  “We’ll ride to every town we pass and scare up a game of faro.”

  I grinned at him then and felt the sun hot on my cheeks. My Pa didn’t impress when it came to farming, or fathering, or being a quality husband to my poor dead mother, but no one could fault his luck at faro. He patted his horse’s neck and nodded significantly. With two mounts of our own, we could zip to and fro and make out all right, as long as Pa could find a saloon. He was a born winner, made by the Lord with a lucky hand. Or that’s what I thought at the time.

  He conjured enough money at faro to keep us rolling along with that wagon train for three whole weeks. Then his luck ran out, and I came to understand that he never possessed a bit of luck to begin with. It was all trickery and fraud with him; I guess it always had been so. Pa’s cheating ways caught up to him that day outside of Kearney.

  Well, that’s how my Pa came to be in the predicament of being shot to death on the prairie. And that’s how I came to be in the predicament of being an orphan, not quite thirteen years old and in hostile company, with five children in my care. And you can see that’s why I’ve always considered it my beginning, the start of my life. The first in a long string of sorrows.

  No one has ever put it in a book before—all the books they’ve writ about me, they all start with grand adventure and the wind in my hair like the wind was in my mother’s hair. But it’s never an adventure that starts a true tale. It’s loss and blood and wanting. It’s a shadow in the grass and a child’s knees uncovered. And life for me—as it is for you—was just a string of calamities.

  It took two hours at least for me to catch up to that wagon train. I rode as fast as my horse would consent to go; I urged that poor beast on with my heels and desperate shouts, and sometimes with the flat of my hand on his rump, till he was lathered up and blowing. I never looked behind me, though I can’t tell you now whether I was more afraid I’d see the man in the black hat, hot on my tail with his rifle trained towards me, or the ghost of my father risen up and coming after, calling me a coward for running and a fool for thinking I might ever get back alive.

  After a time, when my horse slowed and wouldn’t move faster than a walk, no matter how I flailed at his sides or whipped his neck with the reins, I lost the prickle between my shoulder blades. Death didn’t seem so close anymore, though I had just witnessed it not long ago. I allowed my horse to plod. Terror drained out of me; I filled up instead with something far worse. Practical considerations overtook my thoughts—even overtook my sorrow at losing my pa. I was left in charge (in the blink of an eye, or as it were, the click of a rifle’s hammer) of a gaggle of skinny little goslings. That weight of responsibility dragged at my soul and sat there, hot and crushing inside my guts, as if some mean-spirited angel had pried my jaws apart and dumped molten lead right down my tender young throat. The gambler wasn’t behind me now. I no longer needed to fear him. Something much worse lay ahead.

  With time, I found a high bluff and rode up its side. At the top I let my horse drop his head to graze. Far below, the plain had gone blue with the onset of dusk, and away to the east I could see the wagons of our party moving slow across the land. In my haste to save my hide I had overtaken them, though I was somewhat north of t
he trail.

  “All right,” I told my horse, “this is it. Back we go empty-handed, and God have mercy on us all.”

  I rode down onto the grassy flats and waited in the middle of the trail for the wagons to come to me. I was aching by then from the long, hard ride, and worried my horse might go lame. So I dismounted and held his reins and flipped the ends against my hand so they smack-smacked in the quiet prairie evening. The only other sounds was an endless churring of bugs in the grass, and the sleepy notes of meadowlarks.

  Finally the fat man’s wagon came near. His piggy eyes watched me with suspicion, but he didn’t speak a word. I pulled my horse out of his way, then fell in walking beside the wagon.

  His wife with the blue bonnet raised one side of the canvas canopy and looked down at me. I could read the reproach in her eyes. In the fading light, her face looked longer and sharper than ever, and there was no color about her gaze, no flush of passion or feeling.

  “Where’s your daddy?” she said crossly.